TuneIn, the popular guide to online radio stations, today announced that it has seen a 267% increase in the number of its mobile listeners over the last year. The company also announced that its listeners now use the service for significantly longer. Total listening hours on mobile, the company said, increased 348% over the last 12 months.
The service, which is available on over 150 platforms, including a number of connected televisions and cars, now sees itself as a “mobile first’ company. Indeed, iOS and Android, as the company’s CEO John Donham told me, are now the company’s two biggest platforms.
Earlier today, the company also announced a number of new partnerships with over 20 major broadcasting companies. These, as Billboard reported earlier today, include a number of top talk radio brands, including Fox News Radio, Bloomberg Radio, Public Radio Exchange and Monocle 24. This deal adds a total of 600 new stations to the company’s directory.
While the service often flies under the radar of the Silicon Valley press, the Palo Alto-based company now reports that has a total of over 30 million active monthly users from over 230 countries and territories. Sadly, TuneIn doesn’t say how many of these users are actually on its mobile platforms, but Donham stressed that the majority of its listeners are now on mobile.
Overall, TuneIn indexes over 70,000 radio stations from over 200 countries, as well as about 2 million on-demand radio programs. One nice feature that sets it apart from some of its competition is its ability to let users search for specific songs or programs across all of these stations. It gets most of this data directly from the radio stations and the company also reports its own statistics and other information about listeners back to these stations.
The service, which was acquired by Dallas-based RadioTime in 2010, is actually almost 10 years old. It started out as a business-to-business service that sold a radio directory to companies like Sonos and Slim Devices/Squeezebox (which is now owned by Logitech). Since then, it pivoted over to becoming a consumer-focused company and, as the company’s CEO John Donham told me earlier today, that was definitely the right move to make for the company. Today, TuneIn makes the majority of its income from the display ads it features in its web player and mobile apps.
TuneIn has received VC funding from Sequoia Capital and, as our own Alexia Tsotsis reported earlier this year, there have been some persistent rumors that the company raised a large funding round in January that brought the total investments in the site to somewhere around $20 to $30 million. Asked about this, the TuneIn team, as expected, did not comment on these rumors.